Embarcadero Takes Another Good One: CA'S ERwin

There was a day when the ruling C++ development tool was not Microsoft's, but rather belonged to the powerhouse known as Borland. Over time, things change and many of the Borland development products lost their leading positions. From a developers perspective, some of the best parts of Borland were given renewed life when they became a part of Embarcadero. These were products such as such as C++ Builder, InterBase, and Delphi. These tools continue to live on and evolve as part of Embarcadero.

Of course Embarcadero has other tools as well. These include many enterprise level tools.

About a decade ago, I brought in a speaker to do a presentation for our local developer group. We brought him in to present on the leading data modeling tool, Erwin. The presentation drew a good crowd and was a success for us. For enterprise developers, CA's ERwin was a top top tool to know.

While Microsoft and others have moved into the modeling space, ERwin continues to be a top tool. According to the IDC 2013-2017 Marketing Report, Erwin is the market leader in Worldwide Modeling and Architecture Tools.

So how do ERwin and Embarcadero relate? Simply put Embarcadero is expanding their portfolio to now include ERwin. They are acquiring the product from CA Technologies.

While products like Visio are great for basic drawing, if you need to model something of size, then you need a more enterprise-level tool. I asked Embarcadero who is using ERwin today versus a decade ago. The response they gave didn’t differentiate from the past. Instead, it simply confirmed that the product has evolved to fill the same needs:

“Application developers sometimes use basic drawing tools such as Visio for lightweight or casual data diagramming, but with most organizations today dealing with large amounts of business critical data coming from diverse sources, and growing at record paces - professional data architects, and data modelers, and even developers today use purpose built data modeling tools such as ERwin or ER/Studio.”

It is great to see companies keeping the good tools alive. It will be interesting to see how Embarcadero continues to evolve tools such as Delphi and C++ Builder. We can now add ERwin to that list of products to watch going forward as well.

If you use ERwin (and don’t work for Embarcadero or CA), post a comment to say what you like about it!